The Problem Isn't A Lack Of Food Production

CARTER SMITH-WELLMAN | FRESH TALKThe Hartford Courant

Feeding the world's growing population is a problem that can't wait for an answer. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, agricultural production will need to increase 70 percent by 2050 to keep up with demand.

Global agricultural production is projected to grow by 1.5 percent annually over the next decade. At that rate, it would take 47 years to increase production by 70 percent. The problem is that we only have 36 years before we hit 9.5 billion people. Agricultural giants Monsanto and DuPont, as well as the U.S. and United Kingdom governments, are pumping billions of dollars into agricultural technology to increase yields and production. And although creating hamburgers from stem cells is an amazing scientific accomplishment, it is not the most practical solution to solving our food supply crisis. The issue is not so much that we need to produce more calories; it is that we are terribly inefficient in our use of the calories already being produced.

The world's food system is broken, and it's time to fix it.

In 2010, the world produced more than 13 quadrillion calories, enough for each person to consume more than 5,000 calories daily — double the 2,100 calories the average adult needs. This means that if our food system was 100 percent efficient (every calorie produced was consumed and everyone ate only 2100 calories per day) we could feed nearly 17 billion people. So, if we are already producing enough food to feed almost twice the number of people predicted to inhabit the Earth in 2050, what's the problem?

The issue is that we don't just grow food for human consumption. Forty percent of all corn produced in the U.S. is blended with petrol to create biofuels. If that corn was grown for humans, it could feed 590 million people. Yet the government has decided that biofuels are a great use for our grain supply. So if corn-based biofuels are here to stay, is there a way to increase the efficiency of the calories actually meant for human consumption?

In short, yes. "Roughly one-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion metric tons — gets lost or wasted," according to the United Nations Environmental Programme or UNEP.

"In developing countries, food waste and losses occur mainly at early stages of the food value chain," according to UNEP. Farmers in these Third-World countries do not have the capital to invest in technology to keep their crops fresh and pest-free. As countries become richer, infrastructure improves and farmers gain more capital, these early losses are eradicated. "In medium — and high — income countries food is wasted and lost mainly at later stages in the supply chain," according to UNEP.

One example of this food loss comes in the form of labeling. A report, co-authored by the Natural Resouces Defense Council and Harvard Law School's Food Law and Policy Clinic, found that confusion over "use by" and "sell by" dates causes "U.S. consumers and businesses [to] needlessly trash billions of pounds of food every year."

We can continue to pump billions of dollars into research to increase yields and create better genetically modified organisms knowing full well that even if we do manage to increase production by 70 percent, we will have only kept even with today's world; or, we can fix our food system by reducing food waste and loss through new policies and better education.

We currently produce enough food to feed 17 billion people, and yet 842 million people go to sleep hungry every night, and in the time it took you to read this article 33 people died from starvation. Our current food system is falling short in 2014 and it will fall short in 2050. This year, 7.6 million people will die from hunger, that's more than the population of Connecticut and Oregon combined. The longer we wait, the higher these numbers will climb.

Carter Smith-Wellman, 17, of Hartford is a senior at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts.

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